Will Conan O'Brien Keep His Jokes to 140 Characters or Less?

Feel free to take me with a grain of salt here, but I think Conan O’Brien is onto something in terms of how to use social media tools to build buzz for his new “Tonight Show.” Here’s the recipe:

1. Make fun of Twitter.
2. Sit back as Twitterati share joke.
3. Watch “Conan O’Brien” become a top trending topic on Twitter.
4. Measure buzz.
5. Repeat.

In show no. 2, O’Brien launched the Twitter Tracker, a bit that poked glorious fun at Twitter hype. Not only did it seem to be the main reason he was a hot topic on Twitter yesterday, but it got picked up everywhere that matters among those who spread buzz, including Mashable and BoingBoing.

Last night, in show no. 3, the joke in the newly-revamped “in the year 3000″ bit that got the most laughs was this social networking joke, weighing in at an easy-to-share 110 characters: “In the year 3000, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will merge into one super time-wasting website called YouTwitFace.”

Obviously, the show is brand new; of course, it’s going to generate its share of buzz. Another caveat with my theory, as Nick Carlson points out in this post over at Silicon Alley Insider, is that Twitter users are hardly representative of the country as a whole. But what’s intriguing about this is that many, if not most, of the tweets don’t have to do with the newness of the show, but with the jokes themselves. Some of this will continue over the long-term. While at this point, all of this is probably unintentional, I wouldn’t be surprised if part of what starts to go into the writing process of jokes by O’Brien, and even his competitors, is whether a joke can be properly told in 140 characters or less.